Yeah I don't know most of the TSA was just doing their job the best they could. I've come to respect their mandate a lot, reading the history of aviation and how it's all a crazy game to not go splat. It's not the fact of traveling, it's the fact of traveling ON AN AIRPLANE. Everything about it. The basic nature of aviation is it's closely tied to suicide. It's like interwoven with suicide. They are the two threads of one fabric, that give it a color in between, like cloth woven with gold. It's really goddamn dangerous to fly, you're relying on so many parts to work right, despite letting random guys on the street in their pijamas on board with their cellphones, and asking for fucking internet connectivity, no.
I'm completely with Louis CK on this one. We should all fly strapped down completely, upright, I guess with slightly bigger windows as a compromise, realizing the fact of flight and being like "I am flying through the air at nearly the speed of sound, crossing continents and oceans in a mere matter of hours". Just respect it a fuck of a lot more, if flying were easy we'd have flown much sooner. In fact rockets are much older and easier to make than flying machines, rockets got started a little after gunpowder, about the time of the Mongol invasion, and flying machines date to the turn of the century. People think rockets are harder because the space race came after the big improvement in plane speed, nah. Well they're studied together, aero-astrophysics. Basically not going splat.
So 9/11 was about going splat. That's literally what it was, Muhammad Ata and his conspiracy of Al-Qaeda Sunni Muslims decided, let's all go splat with a big plane, at the same building, at the same time. And they did! Because the whole difficulty of flying is not going splat, going splat on purpose is easy (although they were artistic about it, did a lot of difficult maneuvers). Suicide and aviation, interwoven.
So back to TSA, I don't know they actually respond well when you ask them about anything, or thank them for keeping the planes from falling out of the sky. It's not a transportation or border thing, it's an aviation thing.
And one time, when I was repatriating to the states, an agent asked me like what company did you work for, I never heard of that company. As though it mattered, resumes are irrelevant to citizenship once you have it. So yeah there are moments that are rougher. I think I've had good luck.
> Yeah I don't know most of the TSA was just doing their job the best they could. [...] The basic nature of aviation is it's closely tied to suicide. It's like interwoven with suicide.
I would swap "suicide" for "risk". And while I do concede that traveling on an airplane is inherently risky (and argueably one of our most remarkable achievements as a species), I think it's dangerous to deny that TSA - or any other security enforcement body for that matter - is not susceptible to power abuse by their representatives; we have years of evidence to prove it, especially nowadays with social media. Too much blank-cheque power is given them, with little accountability (again, on account of the risk). (Incidentally, airport security is a nice topic to play with error rates conceptually, e.g. precision, recall, etc.)
> It's really goddamn dangerous to fly, you're relying on so many parts to work right
Indeed, the latest systemic failure coming directly from the making and selling of planes. An activity where once safety was held as a sacrosant goal, it's now been placed second to profits and corporate interests (see Boeing).
No, don't swap "suicide" for "risk." It's no secret among pilots. And it's enshrined in the law. America loves the Wright Brothers, two states fought over the right to claim them on their state currency (Ohio and North Carolina). History loves the Wright Brothers. The world loves the Wright Brothers. They were the most famous people on earth (together with their sister) in 1911. And that's why you don't get put in a psych ward for flying, because America loves aviation, no other reason.
And they practically never flew together. Then, at most one of them would die at a time, and the other could live to continue defying death. They were the first great aviators to fly and not die. They crashed sometimes and it was brutal, identical to falling out of a building. There were endless deaths in early aviation, all the time, all the time. In the early 30's the Army was charged with paper mail by airplane, and the weather was terrible, and everyone equated aviation with suicide. Young soldiers dying most days of the week.
I think even Roosevelt said it was suicidal, that what these pilots were tasked with meant leading them to slaughter.
Like heroism, which I carry out all the time, also intrinsically suicidal, for instance all the times I've fought alone, outnumbered. Everyone says that's suicidal. So it turns out it's not actually that dangerous, any more than aviation, you just need to act perfectly, meaning no mistakes.
I'm completely with Louis CK on this one. We should all fly strapped down completely, upright, I guess with slightly bigger windows as a compromise, realizing the fact of flight and being like "I am flying through the air at nearly the speed of sound, crossing continents and oceans in a mere matter of hours". Just respect it a fuck of a lot more, if flying were easy we'd have flown much sooner. In fact rockets are much older and easier to make than flying machines, rockets got started a little after gunpowder, about the time of the Mongol invasion, and flying machines date to the turn of the century. People think rockets are harder because the space race came after the big improvement in plane speed, nah. Well they're studied together, aero-astrophysics. Basically not going splat.
So 9/11 was about going splat. That's literally what it was, Muhammad Ata and his conspiracy of Al-Qaeda Sunni Muslims decided, let's all go splat with a big plane, at the same building, at the same time. And they did! Because the whole difficulty of flying is not going splat, going splat on purpose is easy (although they were artistic about it, did a lot of difficult maneuvers). Suicide and aviation, interwoven.
So back to TSA, I don't know they actually respond well when you ask them about anything, or thank them for keeping the planes from falling out of the sky. It's not a transportation or border thing, it's an aviation thing.
And one time, when I was repatriating to the states, an agent asked me like what company did you work for, I never heard of that company. As though it mattered, resumes are irrelevant to citizenship once you have it. So yeah there are moments that are rougher. I think I've had good luck.